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from the level of emotion in him I knew that what we’d done hadn’t been without risk, that there had been a moment, or two, when he’d felt both of us going.

I pushed at him, so that I could turn in his arms to see what I’d done to Jamil and Shang-Da. They looked like mummies, shriveled and dead, corpses desiccated in some dry desert, but they weren’t dead. Jamil was making a high keening noise.

“God,” Nicky said, “they aren’t dead.” He was pressed against the far wall, as if he weren’t sure he wanted to be near me right that moment. Maybe there were things terrible enough that even my hold on him couldn’t make him see it as all right. I found that oddly comforting.

“No,” I said, “they’re not dead.” I crawled toward Jamil.

“Ma petite, you gained a great deal of power, but we cannot afford to lose more vitality, or you will kill one of us.”

“There’s power in raising the dead, Jean-Claude. You should know that by now.” Obsidian Butterfly, the vampire that I’d learned this nasty, useful piece of information from, had thought she was a goddess, for real, and part of what made her think that was that she gained power from taking life and from giving it back. Jamil’s eyes were dried and blind, but as I leaned over him, he screamed, high and buzzy, but louder. Maybe he smelled that it was me, and he was afraid of me now. I didn’t blame him for being afraid, because I could have killed him with this second touch just as easily as helped him. Both would be energy. Both would feel good.

I prayed. I prayed that I could give this back and gain energy through it. I’d never actually reversed the process. I’d only seen it done. I touched his face, and it felt like dried leather; the strong bones of his face felt fragile like sticks, as if I could have broken his bones if I held his face too tight. I was as gentle as I knew how to be, as I called my necromancy. This was a type of that energy, and it hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but Obsidian Butterfly was the first vampire I’d ever met who could work with this kind of energy.

There was a rush of warm wind as if early summer suddenly filled my skin and the man underneath my hands. It was like watching one of those films where flowers bloom, except this was his skin, his flesh, his very bones filling back out, blooming into the strong, muscled, handsome man I’d known. He came to himself, eyes wide, and screaming. When he could move, he pushed me away and scrambled on hands and feet backward, away, until he hit the wall, and then he screamed again. He held his hands out in front of him as if to ward me off.

I should have felt bad that he was that afraid of me, but the energy felt too good to feel bad. I laid my hands on Shang-Da’s shriveled face, his shiny black hair reduced to straw. That warm wind raced over my skin and into him. The energy filled him, plumbed him, like water returning after a horrible drought. He gasped back to himself, coughing and staring up at me with his brown eyes wide and panic-filled. I’d never seen him panic over anything.

“Your eyes,” he whispered, “they’re black and full of stars.”

They weren’t my eyes. They were Obsidian Butterfly’s eyes. All power comes with a price. I turned to Jean-Claude and found his eyes filled with a night sky that had spilled over South America when the conquistadors had conquered the New World. I felt Richard’s wolf in the woods miles away, and I knew that his eyes weren’t wolf amber, they were night-sky black.

Damian staggered around the corner, wiping the blood of a fresh feeding from his mouth. His eyes were filled with blackness and stars.

30

SOME OF THE other shapeshifters took Jamil and Shang-Da to a back room to lie down. Jamil wouldn’t look at me. Shang-Da did, but it wasn’t a good look. It was more as if he were considering how he would kill me if he had to, and considering for the first time that he might not be able to. One of them dealt with his fear by being afraid, the other by estimating his chances. Either way, I’d damaged what relationship I had with the